The Poetry of AK Ramanujan

Metaphor and Postcoloniality: The Poetry of A. K. Ramanujan Author(s): Jahan Ramazani and A. K. Ramanujan Source: Contemporary Literature, Vol. 39, No. 1 (Spring, 1998), pp. 27-53 Published by: University of Wisconsin Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1208920 Accessed: 20-09-2018 01:20 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms University of Wisconsin Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Contemporary Literature This content downloaded from 128.118.134.9 on Thu, 20 Sep 2018 01:20:22 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms JAHAN RAMAZANI Metaphor and Postcoloniality: The Poetry of A. K. Ramanujan *M~ A etaphor and postcoloniality might seem to be un- related and perhaps even antithetical as academic subjects. After all, isn't the analysis of metaphor wedded to universalist philosophy and formalist poetics, to Aristotle and the New Criticism? And isn't postcolonial literary analysis grounded in sociohistorical approaches to culture, race, and nationality, in critical methods that privilege narrative mimesis over lyric figuration? Perhaps. But, improbable though it may seem, the two areas remarkably intersect, and their unnoticed convergence might help us to rethink not only their relation but also each of the fields. Consider, for example, the implications of this convergence for the Anglophone literary canon, in which poetry is con- spicuously subordinate.1 The relative metaphoric density of poetry has contributed to the genre's marginalization, often making it less susceptible to being read as ethnographic mirror of the postcolonial condition. But if metaphoricity and postcolonialism are affiliated as structures of experience, and if metaphor is indeed a principal discursive site of postcoloniality, then perhaps more attention should be granted to Anglophone poets like Loma Goodison and Kamau Brathwaite of the Caribbean, Okot p'Bitek and Christopher Okigbo of 1. For examples of the general neglect of poetry in the postcolonial field, particularly in Anglophone studies, see the otherwise helpful collections of critical essays and interviews by Jonathan White, Ian Adam and Helen Tiffin, and Feroza F. Jussawalla and Reed Way Dasenbrock. Some subfields within postcolonial studies, such as the Francophone and Lusophone areas, have accorded poetry a more significant place. Contemporary Literature XXXIX, 1 0010-7484/98/0001-0027 $1.50 ? 1998 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System This content downloaded from 128.118.134.9 on Thu, 20 Sep 2018 01:20:22 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 28 * CONTEMPORARY LITERAT U R E Africa, Eunice de Souza and A. K. Ramanujan of India. For the pur- poses of this essay, this last writer will be treated as exemplar of the convergences between metaphor and postcoloniality, after some pre- liminary reflections on the discursive overlap between the two fields.2 "Displacement," "transfer," "migration"-these terms belong to the standard lexicon of postcolonial studies, but they also appear in well-known discussions of metaphor. Etymology begins to help ex- plain this strange intersection of vocabularies. Basic to the word metaphor, Greek for "transference," is the metaphor of movement in space; that is, metaphor metaphorizes semantic and hermeneutic change as spatial movement from one place to another, one "realm" or "context" to another. "[P]hora," as Paul Ricoeur points out, "is a kind of change, namely change with respect to location"; "[t]he epiphora of a word is described as a sort of displacement, a movement 'from... to...."' Further, "metaphor is the transposition of a name that Aristotle calls 'alien' (allotrios)"-a word that implies "borrowing," since "[t]he displaced meaning comes from somewhere else" (Rule of Metaphor 17, 18, 19).3 Found scrawled on the wall of a university bathroom, "Transference," "Displacement," "Alienation," "Borrowing," "Movement between Realms," "Change of Location" would probably seem to echo lectures on postcolonialism, not metaphor. But this conclusion would be overhasty, since the study of metaphor and the study of postcolonialism are both concerned with what has been called "the location of culture," or perhaps even more crucially its dislocation. Metaphor and postcoloniality are both conceived of in terms of the movement, transference, or alienation of discourse from one place to another, a movement that in- 2. The terms "postcolonial" and "third world" have often been criticized for erasing dif- ferences between texts that arise from widely varied historical circumstances (Ahmad; McClintock). Even so, I believe that the categories "postcolonial" and "third world" remain useful in highlighting similarities that cut across various "non-Western" cultures, shaped by their encounter with and response to European colonialism. Such cross-cultural similarities are invisible from more local perspectives, which also cannot help but yoke together heterogeneous experiences under national, regional, or religious labels. To keep in check the generality of the postcolonial framework and to honor the specificity of Ramanujan's work, I focus on the intricate and conflicted texture of individual poems and point to their indigenous intertexts. 3. Here and in my discussion of Ramanujan, I follow Ricoeur and others who under- stand "metaphor" broadly-not in the narrowly semantic or rhetorical sense but as mas- ter trope of resemblance. This content downloaded from 128.118.134.9 on Thu, 20 Sep 2018 01:20:22 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms R A M A Z A N I * 29 volves not only a one-way shift but inevitably a bi-directional hy- bridization. While postcolonial literary study articulates the cultural convergence of places known as "East" and "West," "North" and "South," "metropole" and "colony," metaphor is, according to I. A. Richards, "a transaction between contexts" (94). "Things or ideas which were remote appear now as close," Ricoeur writes of metaphor, describing the "rapprochement," "epiphora," or "transfer" of metaphor as "nothing else than this move or shift in the log- ical distance, from the far to the near" ("Metaphorical Process" 233). Lest these analogies seem merely the product of etymological play on Aristotle's terminology, let us look at a more recent analysis of metaphor that trades heavily in the geographic language usually associated with postcolonial studies. In his influential Languages of Art, Nelson Goodman conceives of metaphor as the bringing together of two different "realms," notably described as "disjoint" or "native and foreign" (81, 72). What happens as a consequence of an "expedition abroad" from one realm to another, after metaphorical "migration" or even "invasion" (73, 74)? A "reorientation": the convergence transforms each of the realms (72). Describing metaphor, Goodman sometimes sounds like a bizarre cross between Aristotle and V. S. Naipaul: The home realm of a schema is the country of naturalization rather than of birth; and the returning expatriate is an alien despite his quickening mem- ories. (77) Its travels result in some displacement on its return (otherwise we shouldn't even know it had been away); but the displacement is far from total.... (83) Does it matter that one can talk metaphorically about metaphors in ways that recall postcolonial displacement, relocation, and transfer? expatriation, diaspora, and migration? alienation and hybridiza- tion? Or is it merely a coincidence? It pays, of course, to reflect on why one can describe sex in terms borrowed from death, argument in the language of construction, and wars as if they were games (Lakoff and Johnson; Lakoff and Turner). In none of these cases is the metaphorical traffic between realms essential, but neither is it negligible. So too, I would suggest, the analogies between metaphor and postcolonialism should awaken us to our oddly geographical This content downloaded from 128.118.134.9 on Thu, 20 Sep 2018 01:20:22 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 30 * CONTEMPORARY L I T E RAT U R E understanding of metaphor, and, conversely, to the prominent role that metaphor ought to play in our understanding of postcoloniality. Although metaphor has often been deconstructed as a totalizing trope of identity and organicity, a postcolonial perspective can help to renew our awareness that displacement, difference, and alienation are no less inherent than equivalence in the structure of metaphor.4 Perhaps I could spell out further some implications of the analogies between metaphor and postcoloniality. Dislocations of discourse, meaning, or culture from one context to another are fundamental to both the metaphorical sentence and the postcolonial text. Moreover, complete integration within the new discursive or cultural field pro- duces dead metaphors and overassimilated art. In order for the newly hybridized discourse to reorient perception, a tension must remain between the native and foreign, tenor and vehicle, focus and frame. Metaphorical or poetic discourse, as Victor Shklovsky fa- mously argued, renews

Load more